FIN – Ice Pix

Digital & Physical release on CD and Cassette on 3/24/17.

CD packaged in a 4-panel digipak with artwork by FIN.

FIN is New York-based multimedia artist Rebecca FIN Simonetti. Ice Pix, her first release on Hausu Mountain, showcases experimental pop compositions animated by her layered vocal performances and her detailed electronic productions. Like her stunningly complex visual art and video work, FIN’s music channels humanoid and digital impulses in equal measure, as she constructs miniature worlds from building blocks of beats, synths, vocal lines, and a wide-ranging arsenal of sampled sound sources. Ice Pix conjures shades of future-facing pop songcraft in the tradition of Portishead, Björk, and PJ Harvey, as seen through the multitiered lens of the modern home studio. Her combinatory tracks streak off into wormholes of ethereal synthesis and clattering percussion, evoking the anything-goes sample mosaic of early 90s trip-hop and the open spaces of Cocteau Twins’ texture-focused emotional sketches. All the while, FIN herself stands at the head of each composition, mediating the divide between lead voice presence and all-in-one production auteurism.

Ice Pix distills vast servings of audio information into compositions closer in execution to industrialized pop music, pulsing with clamorous electronic accents and drum patterns that collapse onto themselves as each song crests through its dynamic narrative arc. “Chickenshit” traces a slow burn upwards, while FIN’s whispers and taunts compound alongside a martial percussion grid and a standing wall of static. “The Collosus” flits between emotional atmospheres over a grid of glitch drum bursts, sounding out at times with triumphant siren calls or sinking into a pensive backdrop of electronic harp and mallet tones. “Gutshot” revolves around a guitar riff that cuts through the reverb haze and builds into a towering feedback accompaniment. On “In Silver,” Simonetti strips her approach down to the bare bones of layered and chopped vocals,metronomic clicks, and synth drone, achieving a strain of angelic swirl akin to the cliffside country scenes of Enya or Kate Bush. Like her dense sonics, FIN’s lyrics demand repeated listens to parse and unpack, as she contextualizes the repeated platitudes, existential pains, and baffling jargon of the modern era as tools with which to seize self-control, to hypnotize, or to make oneself heard above the noise.